April 29, 2013

What a Trip to Helsinki Reminded Me About Life's Lessons...

It’s a funny thing in life in that quite often, the opposite paradigm of the same thing applies: when you ask for something, you usually get what you ask for and equally, when
you least expect something to happen, it often does.

I find that I’m much more aware of both paradigms when I’m
on the road.

The week I was due to fly to Eastern Europe, I found myself
wondering why I was once again heading to a cold climate country when I had been dreaming of warm weather destinations for months.

I often visualize myself listening to Chopin’s Concerto in D
(any of the minors really), on a beach in Chile, breathing in Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni, or dining with a Mr. Handsome in some scrumptious steak restaurant with
award-winning Mendoza wine in Buenos Aires, an evening which ends with a dance
that equally embraces artful precision with unbridled passion. So Argentina I
think. Grace and beauty at its best.

As travelers, we all cherish such moments on our around the
world adventures, as we check off magical moments and experiences we have
on some bucket list. Many of these moments forever change who we are and
ultimately who we become.

These are the magical moments of travel: cultural faux pas’ that end in
laughter, culinary experiences when our tongue is awoken to a new taste we never knew
existed, or a hug from a child who doesn’t speak our language. It’s not just
the tender moments which forever change us but the painful and unpleasant ones
as well. We know this, but we try to avoid them at whatever cost.

With little sleep from the previous week, my emotional
energy was thin, worn down like a pencil which had been sharpened so many times it had lost its original form. In that state, with bags under my eyes, I
boarded an American Airlines fight from SFO to JFK and climbed into a tight
space with someone close to 250 pounds next to me, a seat I had paid an extra $50 for the privilege of this insufferable leg.

I tried to recall earlier moments in time before airlines
nickeled and dimed you for blankets, pillows, headsets and more, shrunk your leg room and seat size, you know....the times before you were charged extra to sit closer to the front,
regardless of whether it was a middle seat or not and before you were charged for
each and every bag. This was a period of time in travel, if you’re old enough to remember, that the
flight to your destination was as pleasurable as the destination itself.

After five hours of cramped flying, I boarded another
overbooked flight, my first with Finn Air, tweeting that it was so, as I made
my way down the ramp. It was the ‘whitest’ flight I had taken in years, perhaps
at all, unless a puddle jumper in northern Canada counts.

The other observation was how structured and controlled the
boarding process was, so much so that I made a mental note that I was heading to the Switzerland of the very north.

Rules were not meant to be broken under any circumstance I thought.

It wasn’t until I sat down in my seat and endured several
hours of resistance and persistence, that my trip to Eastern Europe became
clearer.

My Finnish neighbor was sadly one of the rudest women I had
encountered since my Egypt trip so many moons ago, and even worse, her bitter attitude didn’t lift for the
entire seven hour journey.

As she jabbed me in the side of my ribs, barking over and
over again that the arm rest was her’s and her’s alone, not to be shared, I
found my anger and resentment building. She then proceeded to include me in a
bucket of “god awful Americans”, clearly the result of one negative encounter
she experienced at some point in her life.

Trying to reason with her
in any way that seemed logical failed again and again. After a very sexy Finnish airline steward
with sparkling blue eyes also tried to reason with her and also failed, I spent more of the flight standing up than sitting down, chatting with him in the rear of the plane about her stubbornness, he assuring me that all Finns were not like this. His dreamy eyes gave me cause to believe that he must be right.

When I finally surrendered to the fact that sleep wasn’t in the cards, I tried to
change my own attitude towards this difficult woman, the one whose arm and elbow continually dug harshly into my
side as she proceeded to show me who was boss all the way to Helsinki.

Breathe deep, I told myself and followed with other mantras
and incantations of positive energy hoping that this mental exercise alone would melt her stubbornness. Sadly, this didn't work as it had already become personal since it was clear she hated
Americans. She verbally said so.

As I saw how tightly wound she was, I realized I had been as
tightly wound over the last few months for my own personal reasons. My work schedule has been insane, with barely
a break to do anything much at all except to handle the myriad of external and internal requests and the same cycle repeated again, day after day, even on weekends. Ever have the experience when you exceed all expectations, work over and above what is humanly possible and received less acknowledgement than if you simply played the soldier? Alas, the soldier, which Seth Godin refers to as the cog in the wheel...the obedient employee who delivers precisely what he or she was told, regardless of whether it was a savvy decision or best for the company's success.

Perhaps she had been experiencing something similar in her
own life? Ambushed by some ill form of logic that defied her own odds and deflated her own sense of worth and being? By her employer, her husband, her child, her sister, her colleague?

Either way, I realized that before the plane landed in Helsinki, I
had to rid myself of the notion that all Finns were as rude as this encounter so I didn’t leave the country thinking they were all a bunch of control
freaks who needed the rules to be precisely as they were or else they'd torment you into submission.

The thing about cultural stereotypes is that so often many
of them hold a "certain" truth. The danger of course is that there are always
exceptions and over time, people can dramatically change as we saw over two
generations in Japan...two groups who couldn’t be more different from one
another. If you're not sure this is true, just talk to a friend of mine whose brother wears punk clothing and purple sneakers, has an earring and four shades of hair while his grandmother who doesn't speak a word of English, still wears a traditional Japanese kimono, bows and serves tea.

I know that Eastern Europe is slower to change since they
are fixated on the past more than most regions of the world I’ve visited and I
wondered how much of this had extended over its borders to nearby neighbors like
Finland.

My first time to Helsinki was in 1980-something in one of
those old-fashioned boxed vans hippies drove the decade before. We
had driven north from mainland Europe, across Scandinavia, into Finland and
finally into the Soviet Union – the old Russia -- the one that detained us at the border, strip
searched everyone and literally dismantled the vehicle searching for everything
they deemed propaganda or trade-able on the then thriving black market.

It was a very different time for European travel and nothing
was exactly what it seemed. Just like the experience with my Finn Air flight companion, when you least expect something to happen, it often does and back then, it did more consistently than not.

The wall was still up in those days and tensions were fierce behind not
just THE wall, but the invisible walls, the ones that led east that is – Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and
the Czech Republic (the then Czechoslovakia).

Finland was the most foreign to me, even moreso than Russia
and Poland in many ways, largely because I didn’t expect it to be as foreign.
We knew about the Black Market, about the minimalistic hotels with dingy barren
rooms that were bugged, the
stark food supply, the weathered buildings and surreal lack of optimism...a place where women paraded
around in unfashionable rubber boots and in-need-of-repair colorless coats. Finland never fell under that umbrella however despite its proximity to Soviet borders.

What I remember from my first trip to Helsinki was how clean
the streets were and how distinctly organized everything was in that
Switzerland kind of way...a little disconcerting at first, especially if you had just come from a country like Italy which embraces chaos and passion more than order and structure.

I visited a friend
who was in my South African high school in Johannesburg, where we had spent our senior years.
Not originally from Helsinki, he was either living there at the time or drove
in just to see me. We were but 'babes' and that innocent and youthful naivety was floating in
the air. Combine that with the fact that Helsinki streets ooze playful energy all night long
in the summer since the sun never sets: drinking, walking dogs, sipping coffee and eating ice cream is how you spent your time on open air streets at 3 in the morning.

Mika and I had a magical time walking through the city, lounging
on park benches discussing our life's dreams and aspirations as youthful warriors in-the-making so often do. I think I may have been but just 19 at the time.

The lens at which I experienced Helsinki so many years ago
was through his lens, a native of this strange land with a strange accent and
language that differed so greatly to those on the European mainland. On my most recent trip, I talked to a French couple from Paris who stopped over in Helsinki on their way to the states. She said to me with a surly smile about her experience, "it's only a two hour flight and yet the culture is so different to our world, it's as if a solar system separates us not a thousand miles."

Structure is the word that comes to mind, something they wear on their sleeves, much more than their Scandinavian neighbors. The Swedish and Danish travelers I hooked up with for short jaunts of my first trip to Europe presented a free
spirited energy to their walks and talks.
While my Swedish friends all seemed to have summer homes with saunas they
ventured to annually, there was an equal hunger to explore the world which I
didn’t find from my conversations with the Finns at the time.

It was as if once we
crossed the Swedish border, things and people had more rules and alignment and
order reigned. It doesn’t mean I didn’t
have a great time – after all, Mika’s eyes were dreamy, he was courteous and
sweet, and won me over by swinging me under his arm next to a luscious hovering tree that took us into its breath, creating an aura of moonlight when
the Northern Lights ensured there wouldn’t be a real one.

He treated me to dark roasted coffee in outside cafes and introduced me to other Finns who were intelligent, quirky and
funny, as long as you could understand their dry off-beat humor. We drank beer
well into the wee morning hours, at the time, the most expensive beer I had
ever had. Everything seemed insanely expensive from my recollection….and insanely odd.

Remembering that it was the mid-eighties, Helsinki had price tags that made your jaw drop. An apple was $3 a pop, beers exceeded $7 and
meals in restaurants were simply beyond my reach and so I lived on bread and
cheese. Today, the same is true. A 50 Euro dinner for a starter and main course isn't that uncommon.

Within the confines of those beautiful summer walks under Helsinki's skies, I felt taken care of by Mika and his friends and it was this
memory I brought to the forefront as my Finnish companion on this hellish long flight jabbed me once again.

While hot places like St. Maarten and Greece have been on my mind, and I’ve been puzzled
by all the trips to cold countries I’ve taken in the past two years, I realized
that on this sleep deprived flight all the way to Finland with an angry woman
at my side, that we throw ourselves into the experiences the universe wants us to see, as if they are in fact, a mirror of ourselves, showing us exactly what is happening
in our lives.

It is that visual representation and that insight that allows us to change the course of our lives....that is, if we are paying attention to the signs and can admit the truths we see in the mirror's reflection.

Relinquishing control is not inherently a natural trait of northern
Europeans or the Baltic states and if you think that is a broad statement,
compare the relationship with control and structure of those regions to
cultures like Jamaica, Italy, Spain, Kenya, Fiji…..need I go on? You get the
idea.

Upon this reflection, the plane makes a harsh
landing at Helsinki’s International Airport and I remind myself that so much of the
flight felt like “torture” because I allowed myself to be drawn into
“her” tortured state. She clearly lived in that place all the time and because
I was so out of balance and overworked myself, her torture became my own. I hadn't taken time to look in the mirror - the internal or external one. In order for me to "see" again, it seemed to require a long haul to northern Europe and a flash back in time. I call this a "walkabout," where we venture far away from our everyday reality so we can get clear again about who we are, where we are and more importanty, where we want to go.

These are the lessons we learn on the road. And, for all
those precious marvelous moments we share with new cultures that draw us into such delicious foreign experiences, we also run into people who are internally
tortured or who inflict their pain on us for whatever reason and in most
cases, we’ll never learn what they are. We wonder why were chosen to receive their
torture until we realize it is us who chooses that the experience be one of torture or joy.

It happens on the road,
whether it's in a third world country where someone steals your bag, or
gives you the wrong directions because they’re not a fan of your nationality or
overcharges you because they think you’re richer than they are and can
afford it. The list goes on. Every day life is like this too.

In those moments, we learn about ourselves – what we’re
showing of ourselves to the world in a mirror, the same one that reflects back to us if only we take the time to notice and acknowledge it. It’s in
these moments – painful and precious – that we grow and move forward on our
life’s journey.

My experience here in Finland and soon, Estonia and
Lithuania, will be far from warm sandy beaches with pineapple trees and the
blissful sound of waves that could put me to sleep every night. I won’t be
sleeping in a hammock nor will I be eating fresh fish from a warm salty sea.

But now, I know why I’m here. And with my winter coat, mittens
and toasty wooly hat packed in my bag, I will venture into yet another cold
country experience paying close attention to what I can learn from countries that need to be more in control than not, taking in the gift I
learn from it and from them. New cultures to learn from, to play with...to
be grateful for and most importantly, to remember what's real and truly matters along the way.